A flaming pile of ledgers lit the room with flickering shadows. Ilyan was backed against the far wall, the tall pyromancer in his face. The shorter pyromancer stood monitoring the burning pile.
Taliana charged.
“We’ve got company!” the shorter pyromancer warned, spinning to face her.
Taliana hefted the bag of powder and threw it. Normally it would be an impossible throw for her, over twenty feet. But with ability and strength coursing through her veins, it soared across the room, missing the shorter pyromancer by a few inches and instead crashing into the burning pile of ledgers.
The pyromancer laughed. “You missed.”
“That was haeber nitrate,” said Taliana.
“What?”
The bag exploded.
The shorter pyromancer shielded his face as the blast knocked him off his feet and sent him crashing into a mixing crucible.
Taliana charged the tall pyromancer, leaping effortlessly from one table to the next.
“Taliava, no!” cried Ilyan.
Taliana leapt at the pyromancer, spar of wood aiming for his heart.
He swatted her out of the air with a backhand.
She tumbled across the floor but came up on her feet. Laughing with bravado, she reached into a bucket of tools next to her and pulled out a long bronze knife, normally used for mincing herbs.
The pyromancer drew a sword four times its length.
“You’re no match!” her master cried.
Taliana circled her opponent, her two weapons outstretched. “My master is right, you know,” she said. “You’re no match for me.”
Ilyan smacked his forehead. “That’s not what I—”
Taliana leapt forward, jabbing with her spar of wood. The pyromancer parried, then brought his sword down in a blow meant to cleave her in two. She blocked with the knife, shunting the blow aside easily. Easily? Of course it would be easy! She had agility and strength on her side!
She pressed into close quarters, where her opponent’s sword would be ineffectual. He aimed a kick at her, but she ducked underneath it, then stabbed forward with her spar of wood, aiming for his knee. He leapt upward in a twist, fire trailing in the wake of his limbs, and aimed another kick at her as he landed. This one she also dodged.
“Hah!” she cried. She was untouchable!
“Behind you!” Ilyan shouted.
Taliana spun to see the shorter pyromancer coming at her with a sack. She ducked under a table, threaded her way between two storage jars, then grabbed the far edge and vaulted up to the topside. The shorter pyromancer was peering under the table, sack still in hand. She scampered forward, weapons ready to strike his face as he straightened—
—when the taller pyromancer’s sword caught her square in the waist.
“No!” Ilyan cried.
Taliana flew sideways from the impact, crashing into a scale and toppling with it to the floor. Her weapons flew out of her grasp. She lay on the floor, stunned, struggling for breath.
The pyromancer’s boot appeared in her vision, pinning her to the wreckage of the scale and forcing from her lungs the air she had just managed to gain.
“That was the flat of the blade,” he said. “Try to be smart again, and you’ll taste the edge.” He looked at the other human. “Seriously, Hal? You almost got your face impaled by a snippen.”
Taliana pounded at the pyromancer’s boot with her fists. “I’ll take you both on, you comma-spliced, poorly parsed, dangling excuses for participles!”
The two pyromancers exchanged quizzical glances. “What did she say?” said the one pinning her.
“I believe those were meant to be insults,” said the other. He was standing by the pile of ledgers, extinguishing the flames with convoluted movements of his hand.
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“What is she, a deranged scribal student?”
“She’s the old man’s apprentice. I think she overdosed on a confidence potion.”
An audible click echoed through the room.
The pyromancers looked up—and froze.
“Let the snippen go,” came Ilyan’s voice, hard as steel.
The pressure crushing Taliana’s ribs vanished. She rolled over, wheezing for breath, and looked up.
Ilyan stood next to a set of shelves. His hands held a crossbow: cranked, loaded, and leveled.
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“Taliania, come over here,” Ilyan said, keeping his weapon trained on the pyromancers.
Taliana scampered through the wreckage littering the floor, until she crouched at her master’s side, still wheezing for breath.
“Now listen up,” said Ilyan. “You two are going to slowly back out the door, exit my shop, and walk to the end of this street. This night never happened, you’ve never met me, and you will never set foot on this street again. Understand?”
Silence.
“Understand?!”
“Hal, you back out first,” said the tall pyromancer.
“Are you—”
“Do it!”
The shorter pyromancer slowly edged his way to the door of the mixery, then turned the corner and disappeared.
The taller pyromancer smiled. “Should have had me go first.”
He raised his hand, unleashing a blast of fire that shot across the room. Ilyan dodged to the side, the fire barely missing him as it exploded against the wall. Before the pyromancer could launch a second attack, Ilyan recovered his stance, sighted down the barrel of the crossbow, and fired.
The pyromancer knocked the bolt out of the air with his sword.
“Taliada, run!” Ilyan said, throwing the crossbow aside.
Taliana stood rooted to the spot, her confidence now replaced with a wave of bewildering confusion. Where was she supposed to go?”
Just as she scampered into motion, the tall pyromancer snatched her by the scruff of her neck, holding her aloft like a kitten. His sword tip appeared at Ilyan’s chest, backing the man into a corner.
Taliana heard the thump of boots as the other pyromancer returned. “That didn’t take you long,” he said.
“Listen up, old man,” the tall pyromancer hissed. He shook Taliana like a rag. “I can tell you care about your apprentice—even more than you care about your secret, or even your own safety. I know that because you failed to produce the crossbow until she was the one at risk.”
“Please,” said Ilyan, his face pale. “She doesn’t know anything.”
“She doesn’t need to,” said the tall pyromancer. “But you do. And you’re going to tell me what you know—before I count to three—or you’ll be getting a new apprentice very soon. One.”
“Don’t tell them, Master!” Taliana squeaked.
“Two.”
The sword tip began to move toward Taliana.
“Rosewood powder!” Ilyan gasped. “It’s rosewood powder!”
The sword tip froze.
“Explain,” said the tall pyromancer.
“Rosewood powder,” Ilyan said, his voice trembling. “It has to be specifically from Emerald Lake, in Mitria. For a strength potion, two parts per hundred. For a—”
“Write it down,” barked the shorter pyromancer.
Ilyan stumbled over to a table, fumbling for parchment and quill. He began scribbling, his handwriting far removed from his normal careful script. “Rosewood powder from the Emerald Lake region,” Ilyan repeated. “It must be from there, and only there. The volcanic mineral composition of the water, combined with residual essence from the Emerald Leyline, imbues the rosewood with a uniquely high titrophilic coefficient. A precise dilution, finely ground, will suppress most common titrofic and antropic side-effects. I’ll write the dilution ratios here . . .”
For several minutes, Ilyan scribbled line after line on the paper. The short pyromancer paced around the room, putting out any last embers or scraps of burning paper that had been knocked about in the fight. The tall pyromancer eventually put Taliana down on a table, though he kept a firm grip on her neck.
“Make sure it’s legible, old man,” said the taller pyromancer, looking at the messy script. “And accurate. We’d hate to have to return to correct any . . . errors.”
Taliana began to cry.
Finally, Ilyan set down his quill with a shaky breath. “There. That’s everything your client needs to know.”
The shorter pyromancer snatched up the vellum, eyes scanning the page.
“Does it look legit?” the taller pyromancer said.
“I already knew he imports rosewood,” the shorter pyromancer said. “Quite a lot of it, apparently, and always from the same supplier. It’s not a common ingredient in potions. I think we got what we need.”
“Good. Let’s go.” The tall pyromancer finally released his grip on Taliana’s neck as he moved over to glare down at Ilyan. “I wouldn’t bother getting the night guard. We won’t be back. And if you try to report us, cases like this tend to get a little . . . tied up in the Pyromancy Guild’s courts.”
“You’re kind are disgrace to the name of mancery,” Ilyan said, the spark of defiance back in his eyes.
“You’re welcome.”
The two pyromancers strode to the door.
The tall one elbowed his companion. “Told you.”
“We’re never doing things ‘your way’ again,” said the shorter one. Then they were gone.
Ilyan rounded on his apprentice.
“That was the most asinine, muttonheaded, and addlepated act of lunacy I have ever seen!” he said. “Did the University teach you nothing? Did four months of apprenticeship go wasted? Aquamancy enhances, but it does not make the impossible possible! A strength potion makes a weak man strong and a strong man stronger. But does it turn a snippen into an unstoppable warrior, capable of taking down two highly trained pyromancers? No!”
“I had to do something, master!”
“You downed a confidence potion and charged into battle like a berserker!” Ilyan said. “Did my training fall on deaf ears? A couple drops of confidence can transform performance. But too much, especially in life-and-death situations, can urge people to take insane risks. You could have gotten us both killed!”
The reality of the evening began to catch up to her, and Taliana began to sob. “But your secret . . . I had to . . . yet in the end you still gave it up . . . all because of me . . .”
“Drat my little secret,” said Ilyan. “Up on your feet and go fetch the night watch. I’ll start cleaning up this mess.”